I sense a lot of us are tired of the pace the online world seems to expect. Everything is supposed to be fast and reactive and optimized for a hundred platforms at once. But the truth is that most small businesses are not built for that kind of speed.
Many of us are ready to shed that programming or are learning with other who are doing that or have done that. The slow web is an invitation to step out of the frantic churn and build something steadier and more rooted. Your site can become a home base instead of a billboard.
A place where your work can live on its own terms, at your own pace.
Resist participating in the frenzied dance of business as usual
Business as usual is destroying and cannibalizing life on Earth, yeah? Are you as sick of it as I am? And yet, we participate, we are entangled. Slowing down is one of the things that will allow us to respond instead of react to the many choices ahead of us.
Part of embracing the slow web means choosing the platforms that actually feel good to you. If short form video feels like a tornado and your whole body says no every time you try to use it, you don’t need to force yourself into that space.
It is not a moral failing to step away. While it’s true that we must utilize the tools available to us to do the work of meeting our needs and moving through this time, we do have agency to say no to certain tools.
- Maybe your energy feels better on Substack or in longform YouTube videos or in a simple monthly email.
- Maybe you don’t want to participate in buying new technology and instead buy used gear when you feel you require a replacement.
- Maybe your ideas come out clearer when you speak them, which means a podcast might be a better container than Instagram Stories.
You may have to rework your marketing strategy but the slow web trusts that you can build meaningful resonance without scattering yourself everywhere.
Praxis:
Choose intentionally the places you want to show up online and the places you don’t. Ideally, the showing up should ignite the creative process for you. If it ignites dread, do not put it on the list — delete those accounts.
Let your words be fully seen & utilized as a resonance beacon
It also means letting your content work for you over time. If you pour yourself into a blog post, that can easily become a week or more of content.
You can read a section aloud and turn it into a video. You can pull out two sentences and turn them into a carousel. You can expand one idea into an email. That is slow content in action.
You are tending to the ideas you already have and letting them travel farther.
Your website becomes a steady anchor through all of this. Social media is the wilderness. It is chaotic and loud and constantly shifting. Your website is the hearth. It is the place where everything leads back to.
People can land there without you having to be constantly available or always performing. They get a version of your work with context and nuance instead of the algorithm-safe snippet.
They get to stay a while if they want to and take a look at everything you offer in the public square in a way that you shape, not the way some platform decides your ideas should be contained and dispersed.
This self-selection process is key to building a business that feels good, ethical, realistic to manage without endless scaling or outsourcing or hustle. You don’t need that many clients or customers when you live a life of enoughness. If you’re on the way to that, it’s ok — it’s a process.
So, it’s ok if people leave. In fact, repelling people is just as important as attracting people, both in life and business.
Praxis:
What people do you really not want to work with at this time? Can you identify a dealbreaker in terms of speech, behavior, or patterns?
Slowing down, even online, is helpful in strange times
The slow web is about doing the right amount for the life you are actually living and the business you are actually building. Trust and believe that depth is its own form of visibility.
The people who are able to receive the medicine of your words/work/art will not unfollow you because you aren’t posting every day. They’ll find you because the space you built feels like somewhere they actually want to linger because it’s a respite from the urgent pace damn near everywhere else.
If we beat the system at its own game, we’ve lost. It is no longer time to rush through the contested world blinded by fury and anger – however worthwhile these are. Now, we think, is the time to ‘retreat’ into the real work of reclamation, to re-member again our humanity through the intimacy of our relationships. The time is very urgent – we must slow down. – Bayo Akomolafe in The Times Are Urgent, Let’s Slow Down
Hold your ground and work at your own pace. The online world begins to bend toward you that way. You create a corner that doesn’t require urgency, exhaustion, or constant self-promotion.
You create a corner which is basically a portal to the realm you inhabit or are a part of creating. You’re worldbuilding in real time, and putting out signals for the ones who may be ready to come and inhabit that world with you in some way.
